orm at sea are of
a higher strain than those in passing the rapids in a river.

Finally, there is at first a sense of incongruity in the appearance of a
canoe when in a cart, on a train, or in a house, and you have often to
meet an inexplicable but evident _smile_ at the whole affair, which
perhaps comes from pity, certainly from ignorance, and it may be from
contempt; whereas a sailing-boat crossing the deep is doing what people
in ports and ships know very well about, and if your boat keeps on doing
it successfully they cannot despise the deed because the boat that does
it is small. A man who comes to the "meet" on a little pony will not be
laughed at if he is always well in at the death.

Perhaps the voyage alone in a yawl will not be so often repeated by other
people as that in a canoe, but this last manner of touring became popular
at once.

One of the members of the Royal Canoe Club (The late Hon. J. Gordon), a
distinguished University oar and Wimbledon Prizeman, sailed {240} at
night across the Channel from Dover to Boulogne, paddled through France
and sailed to Marseilles, and thence from Nice to Genoa, through the
Italian lakes, the Swiss lakes, and by the Reuss to the Rhine home again.
A second coasted along England, and paddled across the Channel from the
French side in a 'Rob Roy' made with his own hands. A third crossed from
Scotland to Ireland in his 'Rob Roy.' A critic complacently denied, a
few months before these voyages, that a canoe could cross a bay eight
miles wide. The canoes of our Members have paddled over thousands of
miles in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, including China and Japan,
besides cruises in Australia, New Zealand, and many groups of islands far
away.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Bedtime--A trance--Thunderings--Chart--Light dims--Night flies--First
running--Newhaven--On the gridiron--Mr. Smith--Tumbledown
walls--Derelict.

"Where is the yawl now?" was the question we had asked in the fog, and
the natural answer was--that the chart would tell, of course. So let us
look at the small slice of chart copied on page 245, which is crammed,
you see, with figures of soundings, and names of banks, buoys, and
beacons; but the only thing to be seen on the actual horizon around us,
is the Owers light behind, and about N.W. in its bearing. The tide will
soon turn against our progress towards the east, therefore we tack
towards shore, so as to be within anchorage soundings should it bec